Living with the immediate “ADD” audience that exists today, it’s hard for major studios to believe that kids today can follow the plot of any single movie, let alone a multi-film franchise like what Michael Bay has done with Transformers. It seems like that argument has gotten to Bay and his producing partner Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, as they are currently planning on rebooting the Transformers series to a brand new audience in 2014. From THR:

Bonaventura said that he and Bay were still in early stages of development process, but they wanted to reinvent the saga to pave the way for a new mythology. Bay showed a willingness to shake up the ensemble in Dark of the Moon, when he replaced Megan Fox with Rosie Huntington-Whitely as Sam’s love interest.

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Last night was quite a show for the fans of commercials. We got some new favorites, a few call backs, and yea, even some full trailers of this year’s big movies. For the most part, the major films we got sneak peeks of are Act of Valor, John Carter, and Battleship. But the one that fanboys really got excited for is the extended trailer for The Avengers.

That’s right, more Hulk, more Hawkeye, the first look at the mysterious alien threat, and some pithy dialogue between Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. We got it all in this 60 second spot, and now you get it too.

For those who felt that the trailer was a bit Captain America-centric, we got the scoop in a recent interview with director Joss Whedon, where he explained that Chris Evan’s Cap will basically be the main protagonist in the film.

“So much of [The Avengers] story takes place from Steve Rogers’ perspective, since he’s the guy who just woke up and sees this weird-ass world,” Whedon says. “Everyone else has been living in it. He’s the guy that feels that sense of loss.”

Take a look at the extended trailer after the jump and catch The Avengers in theaters and in 3D IMAX on May 4th.

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It’s never a good sign when a film gets pushed back over 6 months. It’s even worse when a studio like Paramount pushes 3 of their upcoming 2012 films back. That seems to be the case, as the mountainous studio has pushed back 3 of its releases. One of these releases is the upcoming 3D epic Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton.

According to an interview with Deadline, a studio exec for Paramount says this is all part of the plan to push the film overseas, but when a film gets pushed from March 2 to January 11 of the following year, it’s never a good sign.

“This should really set up the international,” a studio exec explains to me. ”Jeremy Renner’s international profile should be in great shape after being in Mission: Impossible 4 now, then The Avengers in May, then The Bourne Legacy in August. As this past weekend shows, January is great play time internationally, and we haven’t done too bad domestically in January, either.”

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Usually January is a wasteland for the box office, dominated by award bait films, studio dump offs and the sputtering remains of the Christmas blockbusters. This week, one new film braved these difficult days and came out with very respectable numbers.

The Devil Inside debuted on over twenty-two hundred screens, bringing in an estimated thirty-four and a half million dollars. The satanic possession horror film raked in the 3rd highest January opening ever behind Cloverfield and  the special edition re-release of Star Wars back in ’97. The movie had a production budget of only one million, which makes this weekend a pretty big win for Paramount.

Coming in second place this weekend was Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , which continued it’s very impressive run. With another twenty million, it now is on pace to threaten Mission: Impossible 2 as the series’ top grosser. The movie has had several weeks of really solid holds and is proving to be the big winner of the crowded holiday season.

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Welcome to the future, a world where it is news that a feature film is being shot on 35mm film instead of digital or in 3D. We now know that the new Star Trek film will be one of those such films, although that doesn’t mean we will be spared the 3-D post conversion.

MTV recently talked with J.J. Abrams about the 2013 film:

“I’m sure, like many people, you see what you do and you go, ‘I really could have done that one better, I should have done that, that was a mistake, more of this, less of that.’ You always do that… I’m hoping that as we do the next one, all the mistakes that I’ve made that I’ve hopefully learned from, I can bring to this one and hope make it better.

We’re shooting on film, 2-D, and then we’ll do a good high-end conversion like the ‘Harry Potter’ movie and all that. Luckily, with our release date now we have the months needed to do it right because if you rush it, it never looks good.

We were talking about [shooting in IMAX] and I would love to do it. IMAX is my favorite format; I’m a huge fan,”

While it is nice that J.J. is looking to get into the IMAX business, post conversion 3D has a rocky history. He sited the most recent Harry Potter film as the standard he expects, but even then shooting for 2D and converting it after the fact never looks as good.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home remains one of the most popular Star Trek films, and is often considered the biggest hit of the original crew’s cinematic run. The movie is certainly the oddest of the bunch and adding to the goofier tone of the film is Leonard Rosenman’s score.

The score is usually sited as one of the weaker elements of the film, but that is an opinion born mostly from one or two very unfortunate cues that made it into the movie. The score as a whole is very good and the movie features one of the best main theme’s written for any of the films.

The wonderful folks at Intrada thankfully see it that way too because they have just announced the release of the complete score for Star Trek IV.

“Intrada ends 2011 with one last major release – the complete Leonard Rosenman score to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The second film in the series under the helm of director Leonard Nimoy, Nimoy choose a lighter approach to this outing and injected liberal amounts of well-placed humor.  For this fourth entry, Nimoy introduced another element he had wanted to bring on board earlier in the series: the music of Leonard Rosenman. Rosenman’s Star Trek IV music bears the hallmarks of the composer’s distinctive style: vaulting brass figures, complex textural passages, thumping suspense motives. The main theme—and also Kirk’s theme—is upbeat, heraldic and heroic, its optimistic flavor cutting a different path than the other scores in the series.”

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I tend to think of Scorsese as a master of genre films—he’s done gangster films (Goodfellas, Casino), comedy (After Hours, The King of Comedy), police drama (The Departed), psychological thriller (Shutter Island), boxing (Raging Bull), biopic (Kundun, The Aviator, No Direction Home), concert (Shine a Light), historical (Gangs of New York), literary classic (The Age of Innocence), even a remake Cape Fear) and a sequel (The Color of Money)—but he tends to bring such a distinct touch to the films, they don’t quite feel like genre films.

So when I heard he was taking a stab at a kiddie flick, Hugo immediately shot to my most anticipated Scorsese film to date (outside, of course, of the fictional film he was making with Larry David as the money-hurling mob boss in Curb Your Enthusiasm)—added to that who wouldn’t be interested in Scorsese’s take on 3D?

And Hugo doesn’t disappoint. It’s not the most compelling story, but for all its two-hour-seven-minute running time, I wasn’t bored once. There’s a lot more going on, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the rundown.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an urchin who haunts a Paris railway station in the early 1930s, repairing its clocks and stealing various cogs and sprockets to rebuild the homunculus he and his father (Jude Law) were working on right up to his death. While Hugo tends to remain out of the sight and mind of the station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s less successful evading the eye of the toymaker he robs (Ben Kingsley). Caught trying to thieve a wind-up mouse, he’s forced to give up his father’s notebook, which includes all the instructions on repairing the mechanical man and provokes a strange reaction from the toymaker.

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He may have his hands in half a dozen TV projects, and Zach Quinto may want to quit acting, but that isn’t stopping J.J. Abrams from continuing in his reimagined world of Star Trek with a second film.

First, Abrams announces that he wants She’s Out of My League starlet Alice Eve to have a juicy role in the upcoming sequel. This is the first hard confirmation of new casting news, seeing as the deal with Benicio del Toro has yet to solidify. From Variety.

As is common with Abrams, secrecy has surrounded the pic since the helmer officially announced he would be back — including which characters the new actors will play. Sources say Eve’s character is new to the “Star Trek” universe, unlike del Toro, would insiders believe will be playing someone familiar to Trekkies.

As if that isn’t juicy enough for all you diehards out there, an official date has also been announced, which will make it hard for actors like Quinto to continue to drag their heals.

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Even though the title sounds suspiciously like a video game, the lastest installment in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible franchise, known as Ghost Protocol, is arriving soon.

Previously, we brought you the first trailer for the film, which we thought looked pretty darn good. Now, we’ve got a clip from it to share with you today.

We won’t do much to set this one up. Suffice it to say you don’t really need any explanation about what’s going on. It should be pretty obvious.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is directed by Brad Bird. It co-stars Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Vladimir Mashkov, Michael Nyqvist, Josh Holloway, Simon Pegg, Lea Seydoux and Anil Kapoor.

Check out the clip after the break. Look for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol to arrive in theaters on December 16.

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Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of turkey day this week’s Monday Pick is the John Hughes comedy road trip classic Plains, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), which stars Steve Martin and the late, great John Candy in one of his most lovable roles.

Working off the “road trip” concept pioneered first by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Martin and Candy hit the open road in order to get home to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving.

Steve Martin stars as high-strung ad executive Neil Page who is in New York City on a business trip. After spending all day as an executive looks over the latest ad campaign, Neil signals to his fellow ad man that he has to catch a plane back to Chicago. Leaving the city at the start of rush hour begins Neil’s three daylong odyssey to make it home to his family in time.

Hughes was the quintessential master of comedy in the 1980s and this film is no exception. The laughs begin as Neil spots an empty cab on Park Avenue. He locks eyes with an un-credited Kevin Bacon who also spots the cab a block or so away.

The two men engage in a foot race in order to commandeer the cab. About to hail the cab and win, Neil trips over a large steamer trunk and falls headfirst into the street.

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This week’s pick is Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999), a newer take on Washington Irving’s legendary 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Johnny Depp stars as Ichabod Crane, a New York City police constable who is sent to the quaint upstate village that is the sight of several grizzly decapitations.

Crane believes in science and deductive reasoning, where as the local inhabitants of the sleepy little hamlet attribute the murders to the slain ghost of a Hessian mercenary killed during the American Revolution.

Crane believes that the killer is flesh and blood, and not a demonic spirit as told to him by the town’s elders. Using his powers of deduction and a bag of scientific/forensic tools to discover traces which will lead him to the killer, Crane is about to discover that in the age of reason, there are still many things that are beyond comprehension in the world of Tim Burton.

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It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Paramount is still looking to capitalize on the success of the first Paranormal Activity. That movie, made for a shoestring budget, went on to be one of the most successful horror films in history.

One of the main reasons for the original film’s success (in addition to the fack that it was scary good) was the inspired marketing by Paramount. It really helped get the word out and get people extremely interested in seeing the movie.

Well, the company is at it again and has a third film coming soon to a theater near you. Of course, they’ve got a new trailer for it out now and we’ve got it for you right here.

In it you’ll see the new film retains many of the elements of the first and tells the story of the young Katie and Kristi when they were kids back in 1988 and the first time Bloody Mary began haunting them. Look for Paranormal Activity 3 in theaters on October 21.

Check out the new trailer after the break. That is, if you dare.

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